Scenes From a Revolution

On 4 July 1965, Jane Fonda's Malibu house party included Andy Warhol, Warren Beatty and Sidney Poitier. Meanwhile, her father Henry roasted a pig with William Wyler and Gene Kelly and demanded that the band - who happened to be the Byrds - "turn it down". This, argues Mark Harris, was a portent of the generation gap about to split Hollywood and widen into an inescapable chasm by the time of the 1967 Academy Awards. Tracing the tangled history of the five films competing for that year's best picture Oscar - The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night, Bonnie and Clyde, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and the far-out trip of Doctor Dolittle - Harris explores how their gestation reflected the clashes between old and new, American and European, liberal and reactionary, that would define a decade. He is excellent on shifting attitudes towards race and homosexuality, but the real entertainment here comes from unsparing depictions of back-room machinations, business betrayals and egos so beastly Dr Dolittle would struggle to tame them.